The Making of 'To Save Our Schools, To Save Our Children': A Conversation With Marshall Frady

On Tuesday, Sept. 4, the American Broadcasting Company took the unusual
step of pre-empting an entire evening of prime-time programming to
present a documentary on public education. It was watched by an
estimated audience of 25-million.

Titled "To Save Our Schools, To Save Our Children," the show was
produced by ABC News's documentary unit, Closeup. It focused in
one-hour segments on three critical elements of the education
system--students, teachers, and the tax-paying members of local
communities.

Planning for the documentary began more than a year ago, network
officials say, with conversations with leading educators and advocates
of reform and preliminary visits to approximately 40 school systems.
Last March, specific schools and communities "that would tell the
story" of the documentary were selected and crews filmed in them
through the end of the last school year. In all, more than 40 staff
members, including 14 editors, were assigned to the project.

The correspondent and principal writer for the program was Marshall
Frady, the chief Closeup correspondent. Mr. Frady joined ABC three
years ago, following a career as a journalist for Newsweek, Harper's,
and The Saturday Evening Post. He attended public schools in South
Carolina and Georgia.

Mr. Frady spoke last week with Associate Editor Thomas Toch about
the experience of making "To Save Our Schools, To Save Our
Children."

Education Week: What did you set out to do in the documentary?

Marshall Frady: Initially, our feeling was that it would be a much
grimmer portrait, approaching an autopsy, than it turned out to be.
Once we moved into the story itself and began looking at the school
systems, it became clear, well before we began filming, that while
public schools are deeply troubled and while the next decade would pose
even more complicated, indeed massive, problems, an elegy on the
institution would be entirely premature.

EW: What "story" did you find in American public schools?

Mr. Frady: We found mainly the consequences, the liabilities, but
indeed the splendor, of the audaciously expanded democratic mission
that has devolved upon America's public schools in the last few
decades. Partially imposed by governmental action, partially evolved
from dislocations in the rest of society, the mandate to educate our
students has widened almost to the breadth of American society itself.
Other nations approach that degree of labor and commitment, but mostly
with homogeneous populations.

The strains and the inevitable dislocations of that effort are in a
way what is taxing--in some cases dangerously taxing--our public-school
systems. As the mandate widens, public schools will inevitably become
as troubled, as contentious, and as potentially fractured as American
society itself, because they are public schools--the people's schools.
They reflect inevitably those communities, both immediate and larger,
in which we live. To me, that's fundamental, the source from which all
other hazards and difficulties emerge.

Students in increasing numbers are coming from dislocated homes or
from families that are not whole--that is particularly true with
latchkey children. We were surprised at what seems to be the growing
magnitude of that phenomenon. Everywhere we went, especially on the
elementary-school level, educators said that it is beginning to loom as
their single most pressing challenge. Robert Coles, [the prominent
child psychiatrist] is considering making the latchkey phenomenon his
next major field of study.

The schools are also faced with the brutal learning problems that
the children of poverty, the children of the 'underclass,' bring to
schools--especially in the inner cities. It is a problem that is apart
from that of latchkey children, or 'day orphans,' as we began to refer
to them.

Latchkey children tend to come from middle-class or
upper-middle-class homes; in fact, the higher the educational
attainment of the parents, the higher the odds that they will have
latchkey children. But at least there are books in those homes and
although there is not that sustained attention and care when they come
home, there is a vision, an expectation that they will one day move
into the mainstream of this nation's life--and most likely they
will.

Not so with the children of the disadvantaged. The kids in the
nether regions of this society, through the precedent of generations,
come to school having inherited little in the way of expectations, of
assumptions as to where their place will eventually be in this nation.
They come to school not only spiritually and culturally starved but
already educationally gravely, gravely malnourished.

The struggle is to somehow--through what has to be an intercession
from the outside, necessarily through the school--at least try to
rescue them with a type of deus ex machina deliverance from those
generations of defeat.

EW: Can schools really meet that challenge?

Mr. Frady: We were surprised to find that, amazingly enough, the
school can break through that social imprisonment of those kids--with
focused attention.

There was a running concern in the section on these students that we
might leave, at least impressionistically, the sense that those kids
were hopeless casualties of their circumstances and could not be
salvaged. The statistics were so oppressive that it was hard to cite
the dimensions of the problem without leaving that impression somehow.
That was a consideration right up to air time.

EW: Did you do anything to alleviate that impression?

Mr. Frady: I don't know if you remember that little girl at the
blackboard in Kansas City. She gets the answer wrong and then she comes
back and she gets it right. That scene--the look on her face when she
got that answer right and the reception she got from her teacher--laid
the hope that she--and, by projection, kids like her--can be rescued,
salvaged. They are the exceptions, but by citing them we hoped that the
impression of despair given by those formidable statistics could be
transformed into one of hope.

Finding schools that are reaching these students was one of the most
thrilling things to stumble across. But those programs are very
scattered, isolated, and in jeopardy. They tend to be federal programs,
and that federal commitment, because of the freeze on those funds, is
effectively declining. You look at the absolutely bleak, blank, and in
some cases abject communities from which those kids come, and then
through those special programs, see what happens to them in school.
Given those contrasts, it really approaches the miraculous.

EW: What did witnessing such situations lead you personally to think
about schools?

Mr. Frady: The picture that developed was that to a profound degree
the public school is emerging as the central social institution in
American life, which compensates for the falterings and the fadings of
all the others. As those secure, stable homes and even those secure,
stable communities--those gyroscopes in children's lives--which used to
be taken for granted, have begun to wobble, to loosen, to disassemble,
those responsibilities have almost by default, almost inescapably,
devolved upon schools.

That's an enormous burden and it is going to take almost
revolutionary measures to ensure that schools are not distracted from
their central purpose, which is to awaken and quicken, to light, as it
were, childrens' minds. It will take an enormous financial extension to
support schools in trying to cope with that new galaxy of
responsibilities. And that's a burden that will, by all evidence,
increase significantly in the next decade.

EW: Did you begin the project with the intention of focusing as much
attention as you did on the social environment around the schools?

Mr. Frady: It was going to be much more strictly an education
report, but it very rapidly and unavoidably widened into a political,
in the broader sense of the word, look at the role that public schools
serve in this nation's life--what they are about; what they mean. It is
a larger political story.

EW: So did you consciously decide to spend less time dealing with
what is being taught in schools, and how and why it is being
taught?

Mr. Frady: One of my regrets is that we did not look more closely at
that. Again, stemming from this widened mandate, the schools are faced
with this much more variegated assortment of students, many of whom in
the past would have been left to drop out of junior high or early in
high school to go to work. What do you teach them? To what ends? Those
are essential curriculum questions. It just worked out out that we did
not address that more thoroughly.

EW: As you noted in the show, the number of these educationally
"at-risk" children is expected to increase steadily in the coming
years. Did you get the sense as you went around the country that the
current reform movement is sensitive to the considerable needs of such
students?

Mr. Frady: Pockets are stirring across the country. But in larger
metropolitan areas, threatened as they are by a social schism that is
perpetuated and confirmed through a schism in their school systems, the
awareness does not exist. It is much the case outside of those
inner-city communities, understandably, of everyone looking to their
own. That is a comfortable myopia that is going to multiply into a real
peril. It is a great deal to ask, I know, of parents who in many cases
have entrenched themselves in those outer suburbs with unquestionably
more fit schools. It is a large thing to reach out to an adjoining
district, in some cases only a few miles away, with the generosity that
they have always shown towards their own schools. To them, the
inner-city schools are like another America, another world, and to
reach out and embrace the children in those schools, children who
aren't their own, who in fact are quite alien to them, children from
homes and a culture that they probably view with considerable suspicion
and uneasiness, is an enormous thing. But it seemed to us that for the
sake of their own children, they must. If that divide between the
inner-city systems and those of the suburbs widens, we will all be
endangered.

EW: Many of today's reformers are arguing that all categories of
students, even those who in the past rarely made it through 12 years of
schooling, should now be exposed to a more academically rigorous
curriculum. Do you think such an approach is feasible?

Mr. Frady: I think it absolutely has to be tried. To so structure
the educational program so that some are directed at various points
through those 12 years strictly toward work would serve to perpetuate a
class-fractured society. It would have been absolutely intriguing to
get into the purpose of education. Does it serve a utilitarian purpose?
Is it in fact to train children to function and to relate in society?
Or is it to awaken every child to their wider past, to their wider
world, in short to civilize? Of course, it has to be both to a degree,
but it is wrong to assume there is no necessity that our carpenters,
steel workers, mechanics, electricians read a newspaper and under-stand
what it means--have basic literacy.

EW: Did you find any examples of school systems or individual
teachers trying to reach these kids with that notion?

Mr. Frady: Absolutely. South West High School in Kansas City, an
inner-city school that is at a precarious point of becoming a custodial
educational slum. They're teaching kids there. Black history, the basic
political articles of faith of this country. Montgomery Blair in Silver
Spring, Md. But, boy, it is such a difficult process. They come in from
a deprived elementary-school past, only falteringly able to read. It is
such a feverish skirmish to try to make up so much of that ground so
they may begin to get a purchase on those larger understandings, those
larger perceptions. But the effort is being made with the deepest
earnestness in inner-city schools and for kids who perhaps in the past
had simply been consigned to shop and those kinds of courses.

EW: What insights would you offer to the educators whose work you
examined?

Mr. Frady: It struck me that there is almost a constant inherent
conflict within the whole educational complex, a running con-flict
perhaps never to be resolved. In fact, success probably lies in keeping
it an active conflict. It is a conflict between that original live
pulse of what teaching is supposed to be and do and all the schematics,
the formulations, the systematic barnaclings of the bureaucracy. The
system, left to its own, will inevitably acquire those kinds of
administrative barnaclings.

Yet, the number of people in the public schools that we found
keeping the pulse alive amid all the superstructures and bureaucratic
wilderness was dizzily surprising to me. It just suddenly made the
project come alive, against what in fact were our initial expectations.
But it is a battle that has to be fought constantly.

There is also the absolute importance of there being an atmosphere
of the highest expectations for all students. This may be a truism to
those who've long labored in those vineyards and it presents an awesome
challenge. Progress is not going to be even among all students, some
may be irredeemable. That's the way life comes. But maintaining that
high electricity of expectations absolutely works miracles.

The correspondent and principal writer for the program
was Marshall Frady, the chief Closeup correspondent. Mr. Frady joined ABC three years ago, following a career as a journalist for Newsweek, Harper's, and The Saturday Evening Post. He attended public schools in South Carolina and Georgia.

Ground Rules for Posting
We encourage lively debate, but please be respectful of others. Profanity and personal attacks are prohibited. By commenting, you are agreeing to abide by our user agreement.
All comments are public.